Happy 30th Anniversary to Cocteau Twins’ sixth studio album Heaven or Las Vegas, originally released September 17, 1990.
My friend Liz was not the first of my college friends to give birth. There were twins and a baby girl in the years before, but Liz was overseas when Robin was born in a Hong Kong hospital, thousands of miles away from where I might be able to attend a shower or hold her on an afternoon visit. We had chatted in the weeks before Robin’s arrival, nerves and anticipation, and when the happy news came, I put together a playlist, “Baby’s First Mixtape,” modeled on the ones Liz and I exchanged for years following college. Cocteau Twins’ “Pitch the Baby” from Heaven or Las Vegas was on there, the first song I played when I got the joyful news.
Heaven or Las Vegas arrived as the first year of the last decade of the millennium began to wind down. The album is overlaid with this gossamer melancholy; there is much to anticipate and some to mourn as time passes and falls away.
But you don’t listen to a Cocteau Twins album so much as you experience it. You can break down the elaborate musicianship of Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde, who create a sonic landscape that is as lush as it is blinding, or you can write a thousand words on Liz Fraser’s siren-esque warble alone. But just as the non-linear lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song are another musical vessel, a review without engaging the feeling of dropping the needle on the reissue of Las Vegas is going to be a sparse one indeed.
I was living in New York City, working second shift at a temp agency when Cocteau Twins’ “Heaven or Las Vegas” came up on the Yahoo Radio station I had carefully cultivated to play the hipster soundtrack of my evenings, Tom Waits and The Smiths and a curated selection of ‘80s college rock inspired by the mix CDs gifted to me by an older, cooler friend. It played for only a few minutes and then was gone, I gave it enough stars to assure I would hear it again. Fraser’s narcotic voice was an invitation to dream, to swoon, to be alternately lit up or flecked with shadow. No other singer I had ever heard was able to capture what she could in her voice; the organic drift of the body amid an orbit of electric stars, fuzzed and softened by Raymonde and Guthrie’s impenetrable soundscape.
“Pitch” picks up where “For Phoebe Still a Baby” on Blue Bell Knoll (1988) left off; she has now given birth to Lucy Belle. Where “Phoebe” drifts and wavers, “Pitch” is rooted and grounded in the act of giving birth and mothering, rather than the abstract. “I only want to love you,” she coos in her lullaby. Fraser’s lyrics are still the ethereal spellcasting of previous albums, but her pronunciation is clearer and, as such, more accessible to the wider audience the band was given after signing with Capitol Records in 1988.
Though hardly a concept album, the twin themes of birth and death echo across the landscape. Raymonde’s father Ivor, a renowned composer for acts including Dusty Springfield, died during production, and “Frou-Frou Foxes In Midsummer Fires,” the album’s final track, wrestles with “a war we all lose.” Fraser whispers and the boys play sparsely until the chorus, not a dirge, but a reflection on the passage of life and time.
Appearing as the second track on the album, “Iceblink Luck” ties both themes together, Guthrie and Raymonde’s wall of sound turned glass and lit from the dance floor like New Year’s Eve. It’s a tender song, a last-ditch dream as Fraser tries to honor the elder Raymonde’s past and resolve her soon-to-dissolve future with Guthrie. “You’re really both bone-setters / thank you for mending me babies,” she sings to the man and the ghost and the babe in her arms, a mending that, like the plaster of a cast, is only temporary. Three years later, while recording Four Calendar Café (1993), she would suffer a nervous breakdown and Guthrie’s drug problems would worsen, the relationship soured and never recovered. But for the moment, there is love between the three Twins, there is hope.
The hope doesn’t last, alas, crumpling on “I Wear Your Ring” and “Fotzepolitic.” They held it together for two more albums before their contract ran out and they disbanded. All three have gone on to produce and record a lifetime’s worth of music since, though a reunion in 2005 was scrapped when Fraser admitted she couldn’t endure being on stage with Guthrie.
Because we’re never going to get that reunion, Heaven or Las Vegas is arguably the best example of Cocteau Twins working with and warping what it means to love, to weep, to create. It is as chill as it is exotic and exciting, meditative and extroverted. A bottle of exquisite stuff, indeed.
LISTEN: